This paper seeks to discover whether U.S. merchants are using their recently granted freedom to offer price discounts and other incentives to steer customers to pay with methods that are less costly to merchants. Using evidence of merchant steering based on the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment...

This paper investigates how buyers allocate their spending among debit, credit, and prepaid cards. Using the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, I show that consumers tend to concentrate the majority of their transactions and a large value of their transactions on a single type of card. The...

We measure consumers' use of cash by harmonizing payment diary surveys from seven countries. The seven diary surveys were conducted in 2009 (Canada), 2010 (Australia), 2011 (Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands), and 2012 (the United States). Our paper finds cross-country differences -...

In this paper we present evidence from a field experiment on the effect of text message reminders and credit card APR (annual payment rate) information on credit scores of low-to-moderate-income individuals. We find that individuals who initially had a low credit score benefited significantly...

To gain understanding on the role of institutional factors on households' demand for risky financial assets, this paper examines empirically the impact of the level of personal bankruptcy provisions in the US. Chapter 7 allows protecting the home equity in bankruptcy up to a certain limit or...

This paper documents and explains the evolution of monetary poverty in Bolivia during the period 1999-2011. First, we find a significant reduction in both, extreme and moderate, poverty. During the period under analysis, extreme poverty headcount, gap and severity have reduced in 55%, 67% and...

This paper explores the existence of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) in 19 OECD countries, over the period 1973-1999, using data for hourly nominal earnings at the industry level. Based on a nonparametric statistical method, which allows for country- and year-specific variation in both the...

This paper shows that the evolution of the level of Mexico real and real per capita output between 1895 and 2008 can be adequately described through a trendstationary model, affected by 4 structural breaks, which occurred at dates that seem to coincide with domestic institutional arrangements,...

We analyze the issue of the impact of multiple breaks on monetary neutrality results, using a long annual international data set. We empirically verify whether neutrality propositions remain addressable (and if so, whether they hold or not), when unit root tests are carried out allowing for...

In this paper we introduce two general non-parametric first-order stationary time-series models for which marginal (invariant) and transition distributions are expressed as infinite-dimensional mixtures. That feature makes them the first Bayesian stationary fully non-parametric models developed...